Monday, September 28, 2009

Iggy Not Catching On, Harper Not Taking Off

And I'm starting to think I'm stuck in the movie Groundhog Day:

An exclusive Leger Marketing poll for Sun Media reveals 36% of Canadians would vote for the Conservatives, down almost two percentage points from the last election. Only 30% would vote for the Liberals, but that represents a gain of 4% since the Liberals won 26% of the popular vote in the last election. The NDP is at 17% support, down 1%.

But of course there won't be an election since the Layton NDP will be propping up Mr. Harper's Tories.

...which is fine for now. The main point of withdrawing support was to pass off the hot potato that is the charge of maintaining this government in power to the NDP. Let them deal with it awhile. From the Liberals, I would hope, we get more stuff like Gerard Kennedy's analysis of patterns in the government's stimulus spending, which was almost universally praised by the MSM.

Substantive criticism, in other words...and hints of policy.

By the way, AA's (widely repeated) argument is bogus, in fact proves Iggy's larger point about the disconnect between stimulus spending and actual need: why would you fund a project that isn't supposed to happen until 7 years out to fight this recession?

5 comments:

George Young said...

AA repeats words from that noted Ontario Conservative Cam Jackson. That would be the same Cam Jackson who resigned once upon a time from the Cabinet of Ernie Eves. One would not expect Mr. Jackson to do anything other than support his federal cousins.
Of course, as the Mayor of Burlington, one might expect that Mr. Jackson would be willing to note that an increase in the gas tax transfer would have got stimulus funding moving quicker. That was the position of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which was rejected by the PR-conscious Harper cabinet.

Big Winnie said...

Well said George!!

As George noted, how is a project not scheduled to be built for 7 years considered "shovel ready" and I believe Jackson also said they had just received the environmental assassment a week ago...More lies by the REFCONs (Reform/CONs.

Anonymous said...

and we always wondered why Harper wasted a couple of $billion on infrastructure projects in Millerland . aka Torranah.

No CPC votes there so an utter waste of money.

Dr.Dawg said...

Nice hed.

Ardvark said...

Yes but it was not I who stood in front of a field and demanded to know why there were no workers in that field today.